Well the reel is now live and, I’m happy to say, being warmly received on Facebook and Twitter. I was particularly pleased to get a nod from Dan Shiffman and Jaume Sanchez Elias who have been two particular sources of inspiration over recent years.

I’ve since moved on to creating a PowerPoint deck to take to upcoming meetups, chats and interviews. I’ve also made a more concerted effort to start reviewing LinkedIn, Glassdoor and other job postings to see what’s out there. Early signs are promising, with quite a few job vacancies in my general ballpark but nothing immediately enticing. I’ve also found it’s very easy to end up heading down a rabbit warren of white papers, Medium posts, GitHub repositories and the like in the process so I’ve implemented a bit of a schedule to maintain focus. I’m splitting my days in half with the mornings spent on job hunting activities and the afternoons spent on learning and prototyping with new tools. I’ll post more on directions there in a future post.

Work on presentations is all well and good but I needed something to display them and my shiny new reel on so I’ve taken the plunge and invested in a new laptop. No, not a MacBook Pro. After so many years working on the Microsoft and Intel accounts I’m pretty heavily engaged with the PC ecosystem, and also because all the software I own is windows based. I considered the Surface Book but feared the 13 inch screen a bit small for serious productivity and with the second one coming out in a matter of months it didn’t seem wise to invest in soon-to-be-outdated hardware.

I’ve instead gone for the Dell XPS 15 with the 4k screen option. Early impressions are pretty favourable: build quality feels solid and the 4k screen and particularly the colour gamut are very impressive. At nearly a grand cheaper then a lower-specced MacBook it also feels like a lot of horsepower for the money. I’ve yet to try any serious rendering on it but the NVidia GeForce GTX 1050 is much faster than my current desktop GPU so I’m looking forward to seeing how it handles some of the heavier scenes I’ve built.